The LA Clippers aren’t the biggest story in the NBA right now – they’re just the best story. Apply that to Los Angeles as well – not the biggest, just the best.

It’s a shame that Donald Sterling is around to enjoy such a narrative.

Chris Paul and the LA Clippers have played well enough to push owner Donald Stern and his antics out of the news. (AP Photo)

Nobody deserves this success, this groundbreaking start to the season, this stunning winning streak, this lofty status among the NBA elite (albeit with two-thirds of the schedule left) less than the Clippers’ owner himself.

Yet that might be them most delightful piece of the Clippers’ renaissance. The more you watch them, the less you think about who owns them.

Check the highlights of their latest win Friday night in Utah, 116-114, storming back from a 19-point hole. It was their franchise-record 16th straight, the longest run in the NBA in four years. They’re perfect in December; They have the best record in the NBA; And they are two wins away from entering the top 10 of all-time league winning streaks.

Chris Paul was the hero Friday. He scored 29 points, 22 in the second half, nine in the fourth quarter, and two from the line with 3.4 seconds left that clinched it.

Brings Sterling to mind, unfortunately, although it brings David Stern and his “basketball reasons” to mind first. How ironic, though, that if not for those unsavory “basketball reasons” a little over a year ago, Paul is dressing in the other locker room at Staples Center instead of Steve Nash. The Lakers, who are on their own little streak of late, remain the Lakers, and the Clippers are the Clippers again.

Well, not quite ironic. It's more like unfair. If there were real justice in the NBA, things would not be coming up roses for Sterling – just fertilizer.

But if he gains from this, so does the NBA, as well as the city of Los Angeles, which includes the collection of Clippers players, coaches and management that has risen above the circumstances provided them and the history shadowing them.

Instinct tells us to let this season, and the next few after that, play out. But by all appearances, what has been built in Clipperland is built to last. With every victory, and with every increased mention in the conversation about legitimate championship contenders, there is less reason to think that anyone would want to break this up.

Paul, who becomes a free agent this summer, will want to stay and cast his lot with them as he hits the prime of his career. Blake Griffin will not want to leap for the nearest contender the first opening he has (which, at the earliest, is four years from now). The same for DeAndre Jordan and Eric Bledsoe. If veterans like Caron Butler, Jamal Crawford and Matt Barnes start looking elsewhere eventually, other productive vets like them will want to take their places – and the aforementioned ones might leave with a ring, or at least with a nice, long playoff run tucked away.

This is looking real.

The Clippers now expect to win. They’re expected to win. They’re potentially a destination, instead of a place to avoid until there’s no one else left offering a paycheck. Even their celebrity row is starting to gain some heft, although it remains short of Lakers levels in the building they share. Hey, Bieber’s got choices. The Clippers are one of them now.

Of course, the Clippers could use work in retaining more than star players and courtside star wattage. The architect of much of this roster, general manager Neil Olshey, is now “former” general manager. The Clippers didn’t extend his contract last year – you know, the year he wriggled in and snatched away Paul after the debacle of the nixed Lakers deal, and the year the Clippers reached the second round of the playoffs for the second time in 34 years on the West Coast.

Again, though, that’s the beauty of this start by the Clippers. No news about the owner is good news. On his watch, the news about the on-court product has been perennially bad. Off-court news concerning him has tended to be worse.

Yet even that has been whitewashed by this run. A week before Christmas, he lost another court case related to his constant real-estate shenanigans, this time for $17.3 million.

The judgment was sandwiched between consecutive wins No. 10 and 11. Nobody noticed it. The nation, though, was starting to notice the wins. It was a stunning oversight, and the best one the franchise could have ever wanted.

This is still only Season 3 of the reconstruction of the team, and of its image. It was only a year before that, that the Clippers were their same old cursed selves, with Griffin injured and unable to play in his first season after being picked No. 1 overall.

Even more recent than that … remember the reaction early in the lockout-shortened season last year, when Chauncey Billups blew out his knee? “Here we go again.”

Nobody says that any more. Fewer observers every day are scanning the path in front of the smoking-hot Clippers searching for the inevitable banana peel.